“Homosexuality” and “sexuality, Sexual Ethics” by David F. Wright in Dictionary of Paul and his Letters edited by Gerald F. Hawthorne, Ralph P. Martin and Daniel G. Reid (InterVarsity Press, 1993).
by Dr. Ralph Blair
Wright says that Paul’s approach to sex is “inimical to the post-Christian West’s obsession with unbridled sexual gratification [and] licentiousness”. And so it is. He also says: “For Paul sexual intercourse is not on a par with the satisfying of other natural appetites like eating”. But Luther – hardly a post-Christian, though traditionalists of his day may have thought he was – proclaimed with earthy graciousness that one can live without sexual companionship “as little as one can live without eating, drinking, sleeping and other natural necessities because it is an urge planted as deeply in human nature as eating and drinking”. It’s this deeply implanted nature of sexuality that conservative Christians such as Wright refuse to take seriously in debate over homosexuality. And they fail to see what Milton saw: that sexual “loneliness is the first thing which God’s eye nam’ed not good”. They follow the ascetics of Paul’s day and those who accursed Luther and the Puritans of “sensual and licentious living” and of “lust[ing] fast in their lechery”.
As a lecturer in church history, Wright should know better. As a sexual being, he should know better. And as author of the entry on general sexuality, he does seem to know better: sexual acts are, he says, “uniquely expressive of one’s whole being”, “sexual activity embodies the whole person”, “a sexual being … a human being is a body rather than has a body”.
He insists that Paul is speaking of something Wright calls “genetic” homosexuality in Romans 1, even though he avers that Paul was ignorant of “a distinction between persons of heterosexual and homosexual orientation” and of “ ‘monogamous’ same-sex relationship” and had “inherited” his information on same-sex activity from Hellenistic Judaism and Stoicism. Wright admits that the homosexuality “of Paul’s day [was] chiefly in the form of pederastic liaisons” – hardly homosexuality as we know it today. But then he argues that Paul’s mentioning both male and female acts in Romans 1 could not be about pederasty. That’s true. But Wright then insists that the Apostle is not discussing what he himself correctly states is the main same-sex behavior of Paul’s day! Wright thus fails to recognize that the same-sex activity that did involve both men and women – the sacral prostitution of ancient Palestine and the entire Mediterranean world – best illustrates Paul’s primary argument, his critique of Gentile religion. This point was preparative to his calling Jewish religionists to account. Wright claims rather that Paul’s argument turns on homosexual “flouting of sexual distinctions basic to God’s creative design”. But in doing so, Wright ignores the fact that Paul saw no theological significance to the two-gender pair, as Paul had already argued in his construction of the “no male and female” phrase in Galatians 3:28. Wright repeatedly mistranslates Paul’s “male and female” as “male nor female”. Richard Longenecker and F. F. Bruce are two evangelical biblical scholars who specifically note that Paul’s changed construction here (from neither/nor) both reflects and governs Genesis 1:27. Turning to I Corinthians 6, Wright correctly observes that arsenokoitai “is not attested before” this epistle and that “English translations vary considerably”. He maintains that the term derives from Leviticus in Greek translation even though the compound, as such, does not appear in the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible among Hellenistic Jews. Even if it does so derive, that priestly code cannot be separated from its focus on ritual purity. Also, as Longenecker says, “the Mosaic law, for Paul, was intended by God to be in effect for God’s people only up until the coming of Christ” and he approvingly cites Westerholm on Paul’s never deriving appropriate Christian behavior by simply applying Old Testament legal precepts. Wright asserts, merely by quoting a Greek sentence in English, that later usage of arsenokoitai means “homosexuality”! Yet, after Paul, the first extant instance of the term references sex between men and women. Wright admits that the other key term in question, malakoi, means “soft”. But what does that mean?
Wright concedes: “Paul never addresses the subject of human sexuality in a systematic manner, but [only] in response to particular questions”. He knows that in what he calls “Paul’s most extended discussion of sexuality … Paul lays the groundwork for a suggestive and flexible Christian sexuality”. He acknowledges that the translations of the Greek terms that are key to his argument “vary considerably”. He admits that Paul was ignorant of sexual orientations and of monogamous same-sex partnerships of peers. He concedes: “The paucity of Paul’s references is inconsistent with its being incomparably execrable”. He grants: “Paul does not single out same-sex intercourse as specifically perverted or monstrous”. He’s aware that sexuality is a core “whole person” experience and not simply a genital act. He recognizes that a life of “sex-free singleness” is possible “by divine gift alone”. One of the editors grants, in his entry on marriage and divorce, that “life brings people situations in which the ideal is not always attainable, even by the redeemed”. (Hawthorne) Thus we can only guess at why Wright and his editors and publisher find it so very necessary to insist in the current debate: “It is nevertheless a safe conclusion that … Paul could only have regarded all homosexual erotic and genital behavior as contrary to the creator’s plan for human life, to be abandoned on conversion”. “Safe” for whom?